


you are ophelia drowning

by sebfish



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-12
Updated: 2013-06-12
Packaged: 2017-12-14 18:01:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/839762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sebfish/pseuds/sebfish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You think about Ophelia drowning while your brother sits in the passenger seat, thumb pressed into the palm of his left hand as he fights off ghosts that can’t be killed by salt and iron. </p>
<p>Set mid-Season 7, contains very light Wincest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you are ophelia drowning

You think about Ophelia drowning while your brother sits in the passenger seat, thumb pressed into the palm of his left hand as he fights off ghosts that can’t be killed by salt and iron.

 

You’ve got vague memories of reading _Hamlet_ your senior year of high school, even though most of your memories of a small school in rural Iowa involve miles of cornfields and Cindy Lane in the backseat of the Impala on prom night. You remember a slight brunette English teacher on the wrong end of forty whose soft smiles reminded you of _Hey Jude_ and tomato soup with rice. You remember actually reading the books assigned for the class because you didn’t want to disappoint her.

 

You remember salt-and-burns and your dad’s rough nod of approval, the closest thing you’d ever get to praise. You remember an English teacher who saw more than a cocky kid in a too-large leather jacket that wasn’t his own, who introduced you to Vonnegut and helped you realize that reading could be just as important as stripping and rebuilding a gun and just as much as of a weapon.

 

You remember being called up to the front of the class to read Hamlet’s speech aloud and not really understanding it because _to be or not to be_ is never really a question when you’re a hunter, you just go and go until you drop. And maybe you still don’t understand it, even now, even with all the shit the world’s thrown at the two of you, you don’t think you could just stop as long as you’ve got Sam in the seat beside you. Sam’s always been Hamlet, anyway, could never bear existing without asking why, fighting and railing against his fate every step of the way.

 

And maybe that’s why, back when you were newly twenty-two and he was in his senior year he took to reciting that same damn speech for two weeks straight until he had it memorized and you kept getting pieces of it stuck in your own head from hearing him recite it. And maybe Hamlet never had the devil in his head but you can’t help thinking that Sam’s more Hamlet now than he ever was before, shaped by grief and loss and a need for revenge that brought on the apocalypse and maybe destroyed as much as Hamlet was destroyed by Laertes’ sword in the end.

 

You remember struggling through an essay in that English class, maybe one of the only essays you’d ever taken seriously, writing on grief and loss. But it wasn’t ever Hamlet’s struggles that’d interested you, but a girl who lost her father to death and her lover to madness and who ended up so lost herself that she drowned herself to escape it all. But as much as you’d thought you understood her then, with a mom lost to fire and a dad lost to revenge, you think now that you didn’t really get what her story was.

 

It’s this life, now, with Cas gone and your brother lost inside his own head that makes you really understand how much that can break a person. How you can lose and lose and lose and keep waking up and hoping that today’s gonna be the day when things are okay but they’re not. And you keep pushing through it every day until you’re stretched so thin that you can’t even breathe with it.

 

And suddenly you realize, _oh_ , that maybe you are Ophelia drowning. She had her brook and you have your beer and bottles but it’s all one and the same when it comes down to it, a cool liquid escape from a world when it’s just too much and you can’t even breathe and you don’t want to breathe and sometimes you wish it would just stop.

 

And you wonder if someone’s gonna find you, later, washed up on the shore. _There is a willow grows aslant a brook_ —

 

—but  Sam’s looking at you and he’s _looking at you_ , not some figment of his imagination and you think _maybe not_ and maybe that’s the difference between you and Ophelia because nobody pulled her out until it was too late but you’ve got Sam and you’ve both been pulling each other out since you pulled him out of a burning building when you were four years old. And he’s giving you an odd look like he’s wondering what’s going through your head but there’s nothing you want to tell him that wouldn’t sound weird or crazy and maybe a little bit because you know he’d laugh if he knew you were comparing yourself to a crazy chick and even if you’re really the girl in this relationship he doesn’t need to know that.

 

So you shrug and smile and turn up the volume on the radio and he rolls his eyes and goes back to looking out the window.

 

You’re in a stolen car and your brother’s got hell in his head, but as you fly down the highway with your brother in the passenger seat, you think that maybe you’ll be okay, just this once.

 


End file.
